How Do You Attract, Retain & Increase Talent Within Your Team?

If I were to ask what was the biggest challenge facing you as a manager today, many replies would cover the inability to attract, retain and maintain talented individuals to their teams.

Ask yourself if the strategies you are currently employing are enabling your most talented individuals to build a career platform with you.

If people you interview ask why they should take the job you are offering them, what would you say that would make that talent move heaven and earth to work for you.

And does your vision and mission shout so loud that talented individuals apply to work at your company even though jobs are scarce or not advertised?

You need to have a strategy that encompasses all elements of talent management, from planning for introducing talent to the company, through performance enhancement, learning and development opportunities, succession development and remuneration.

Your talent management system should include:

1) How you plan and strategise for talent recruitment

This involves being aware of what talent in your area and your industry is looking for from the companies they wish to work for

2) Recruitment policies

This concerns how you go about developing strategies to recruit, appealing to the people you know you want in the areas in which they search

3) A performance leadership initiative

You need to identify how you will measure performance and what expectations you will have of the level of talent you are wishing to recruit

4) Develop deep expertise and career development

This involves being aware of the expertise you require to perform at the best level and how you will tap into this new-found resource you are developing

5) Create mobility and agility in talent leadership

Expectations on working environs will be high in talented individuals, and this may involve a change of mindset in where they actually work and how they get the job done

6) Skill utilisation and development

This requires you to reinvent how the skillsets of people are used and monitored, so you reward the initiatives and creative thinking of your talent, and develop their skills in areas that will be required in the future for your business.

This may include e-learning and courses on concepts like problem-solving, creative thinking and critical analysis.

7) Remuneration

This could involve a new heightened initiative as you develop and maintain your talent to become the most valuable assets to your company and its future.

You need to be contemplating this as a ‘total overall rewards’ policy, rather than just thinking of it as salary.

Today’s talented individuals under 35 may well be looking for things beyond the salary package to still maintain their loyalty to you.

Think of this as now being a new strategy that you use as a framework for all of your talent recruitment, analysis and retention policies.

It requires you to think broadly about how you wish your department to be structured in the future.

And, as we stated at the beginning, are you offering projects and opportunities that will inspire the very best talent you can attract to actually want to work for you?